Timothy Atherton ~ Immersive Landscapes

A bit of Finnegans Wake where Joyce is playing with the influence of Beckett as well as with words:

"...the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip. You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne."

It somehow speaks to what I am trying to do, even while I still don't quite grasp it....! The idea of "bethicketted"

Growing up beside tidal marshland on the English Channel I was always drawn more to the salt marshes with their low surrounding scrub and wind battered trees and to small dense moorland copses rather than to the big ancient forests of Britain. And so northern boreal forest has a familiar echo with its low, thick, dense, tangled scrub that resonates with something ancient.

But to try and impose order on this messy and unordered view seemed a mistake. I found I enjoyed the aparent the disorder, the fine detail spread over the whole image and allowing the eye to wander over the whole field without finding a clear point of rest.


The trees lack height and substance. There are no massive oaks or giant redwoods to anchor the forest either physically or visually - no forest canopy - and the northern forest lacks a dark dense forest floor. Instead the harsh oblique summer sunlight angles through and reaches all but its deepest parts giving areas of strong shadow and highlight. The results are what I’ve come to call "immersive" landscapes where the whole wide image is provides lots of smaller and hopefully interesting subplots over and against the overall story that the picture is telling.

See more Bethicketted

FEATURED COMMENT: Jim Jirka wrote: "I really do not know why I am so drawn to this type of image. ??? Oh yes I do. ;-)" - please see Jim's photograph above.

And, Jim, please tell us "why (you) are so drawn to this type of image..."